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Chinese Subvert Censorship With a Popular Pun
Anonymusing writes "In spoken Chinese, 'grass-mud horse' sounds virtually identical to an obscenity (hint: it begins with "mother-") — and as a cartoon character, it has become an amazing phenomenon. Meant as a subversive attack on censors, the alpaca-like mythical creature has led to a cuddly stuffed animal — selling over 180,000 in a few weeks — and a wildly popular YouTube video with children's voices singing words that are either completely benign or incredibly offensive, depending on how you listen." Update: 03/13 09:29 GMT by T : Since this story was set up, the originally linked video seems to have been pulled. Searching YouTube reveals that there are some alternatives available, at least for now.
Fill in the blanks.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Watch the cnut moderators censor this fscking post for all the shirty language it contains!
Hey, mods: kiss my RSS!
Let's call the next campaign "maathe-phaacqer".
I would be careful reading any subversive meaning into this - they're just tweaking the noses of the net.cops. Most Chinese people think that the government does a good job keeping society clean. To them, unrestricted freedom means chaos, and China certainly has lots of experience with chaos ruining their country. I mean, the 1949 takover by radical lefists was considered an improvement, and they killed 60,000,000 of their own countrymen.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I find it fittingly ironic that in a story about the nefarious Chinese censorship that the slashdot editors felt it okay to censor the expletive in question.
I ended up doing this to phonetically construct sentences to pass a filter at someone's job, as you cannot write about less by Anns without it triggering it. And if you have friends who are less by ann, that might be a problem if you decide to write about it.
I hope this doesn't inspire spammers though; Just imagine an inbox with Jew cheese hot who men taking a hot low duh! Now with 5 extra inches of pie Nile mask joule in men lay Ness. With slew tea nurses.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Mandarin is the spoken Chinese in Beijing, Taipei and Singapore. (Cantonese is the spoken Chinese in Hong Kong.)
---
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese_profanity
Learn Mandarin today and amaze your colleagues and bosses!
mother-in-law?
that was one crazy fucked up video. here, this one has translation :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKx1aenJK08
i think that even would be on the borderline in u.s.... for the censor people in it probably sounds like someone's fucking their brain from the inside.
Read radical news here
and upload it to every video site ! we can show those censors what the power of internet is, and they wouldnt have any chinese to prosecute in the end. result : total brain damage.
Read radical news here
more background is still needed :D besides the "grass-mud horse", another animal, "river crab" is also popular in China now, which is the enemy of the "horse". in Chinese, "river crab" sounds like "harmony", which is what the Chinese government use as an excuse to shut down websites they don't like.
The video has disappeared from youtube. I guess the censor woke up.
I wonder how easy it is to lip-read cantonese.
;).
If you know the language, you don't have to be a ventriloquist to _easily_ say a lot of words without moving your lips.
And the exact same lip movement but different tone = totally different meaning.
There's a bit more movement with mandarin but it's not much easier
Of course no one would censor "motherfucker" or "fuck your mother" in the west on a website or in public television. Must be pure chance that everytime somebody says "cock" or "fuck" on TV in the US there is a beep sound.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKx1aenJK08
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
In my language, there's a catchy children's song about squirrels up in the tree or on the ground, who do not sleep and play around. Grown-ups can hear the song about squirrels or then again, more likely about whoring up in the tree and on the ground and the whoring never stops. It all depends on how twisted you are.
Is this offensive to Chinese?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8WLIVCrRuY
(Monty Python's 'I Like Chinese')
Maybe I'm racist and don't know it, I thought Balls of Fury was funny.
a compelling ambition, powerfully presented. most of the ability to accomplish the task lies in the day to day behaviors of billions of folks, & is frequently set off course by the actions of a handful of greed/fear/ego based megalomaniacs, & by ourselves, partly due to the almost perfect presentations of misinformation to us, by the aforementioned execrable. do not confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. the lights are coming up all over now.
Right now this story is tagged mikehunt.
I will have you all know that this is no joke. My real name is, no lie, Micheal Hawk, or Mike Hawk.
Junior High was particularly painful for me.
That is Sofa King Awesome!
The youtube videos may be new to most people (and they're not new), but the grass-mud-horse and other Chinese puns are nothing new. I've heard them since I was a kid. (This is like why Canon's camera went from G7 to G9.)
..Sofa King We Tod Did.
May the Maths Be with you!
http://pedobear.org/
To allow the mouth to be able to rejoice !
Squirrel!
It must be nice to be famous, always having people thank you when at their high school graduations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3qj4KX6yXw
nsfw
I mean, George Carlin has been doing things like this ages before I was born. Like the "you may prick your finger but doooon't finger your prick" bit. Not to mention the ancient song about the rooster, the donkey, the dog and the cat.
Well, maybe the difference is that those words don't just sound "bad". They are. But it depends on the context, and when you insist that you use them in a benign context, it's funny because you can "cheat" the censors. Can't censor that, I was just singing about a rooster, a donkey... whyyyyy, what did YOU think? Is it me that's naughty or is it your thoughts?
I think that's what any of those songs are about. They should show you that you, and only you, are "naughty" here if you consider this naughty.
Maybe we can learn a bit about who's the pervert from the Chinese. The one that (maybe even actually innocently) sings a tune, or the one that wants to hear something naughty in it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As a Chinese, lemme explain some background..
The "grass-mud-horse" thingy used to appear in the Baidu Baike, Baidu's Wikipedia-like project. The Baidu Baike is widely regarded as part of government's effort to control Chinese people's source of information and a central hub of the whole "harmonization" stupidity, for Baidu is at the same side with the govn't. By creating a new webopedia it gives them more control over it. Naturally the contents in Baidu Baike are heavily censored against politically incorrect material but no one gives a shit about factual accuracy or copyright violations that's rampant there.
Some anonymous person thus put the articles for "grass-mud-horse", along with other jokes of this kind, to Baidu Baike. Unsurprisingly they stayed there for quite a long time without being removed, because there was no "political" stuff in them, even if the contents were outrageously out of touch with reality. This was seen as a punch in Baidu's face, and by extension, a joke on government's attempts to control online speech. After the "grass-mud-horse" became widely known the Baidu Baike articles were removed but the meme went wild.
So much for the background. I hope I made some points across the Great Language Barrier.. It's kinda surprising to see you guys here discussing the caonima stuff at /. ;)
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I Am Sofa King We Todd Ed
i dont have mod points. used it up in some hardware story
Read radical news here
Ok, I am interested in one aspect of the story and after reading the articles and doing some searching I still cannot find the answer.
What is a "grass mud horse" and have some pictures of a real one? The dolls look more like a lamma, and if that is what they are how did that name come about?
Humphrey Lyttelton jazzman, God of the double entendres, and now Freedom Fighter!
Sorely missed :(
Uh, Mike Rackhabbit strikes again!
I didn't hear it in the one video I listened to.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Wow, the "cuddly stuffed animal version" is very appealing. Does anyone know where I can get one of these? I feel that I must have one for my desk.
It's Mother-pus-bucket, of course.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Not to split hairs but the meaning is actually:
"Go 'make love' to your mother."
And if you ever NEED to cure someone out in Mandarin just remember "shabby" but pronounce it with a litte "shaah bee."
And then if they are bigger than you: run.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
It doesn't begin with mother
It actually means Fuck Your Mum.
They even copy Briney Spears.
Technically all the little animated gifs at the top are just modified versions of the Bunchie... http://www.wildpixels.com/bunchies/info.htm
Something the author of the first post seems to not have understand, is that "grass" and "fuck" is spelled the same way (eg: cao in pinying) but said with a different accent (the falling one means fuck). Same goes with "ma" that can mean mother or horse. I am really not sure about "mud" because I don't know what chinese word we are talking about here, but maybe someone can explain ?
Same thing, just an American card game that takes a phrase of words that you have to say correctly to figure out what the hidden meaning is. It's a pretty fun game to just sit around with some friends or family and try to guess the phrases even if you don't keep score.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAD_GAB
http://www.playmadgabonline.com/
haha, now that I think of it, why does it not surprise me that someone in the states has already figured out a way to profit from the idea.
Is it lame that I defeat the lameness filter despite the fact that I realize my post is lame?
First, I think this is wonderful on two levels; as someone who doesn't believe in censorship in any form, and as a lover of languages (especially puns, good or bad).
Second, this is a perfect example of what happens when you combine the worst of bureaucracy, which destroys the spirit of the laws and censorship, which destroys the spirit of the people.
What a bureaucracy will never be able to accomplish is the true purpose of censorship in squashing the intent behind foul or dissident language. By its own nature, a large government loses ability to look at the mutable nature of intent and reduces circumstances to the most black and white of possibilities.
Situations like this expose the inherent flaw in red-tape censorship structures. A seemingly innocuous phrase with the intent of being a "bad word" is allowed to be a cultural movement, while an article on the etymology of curse words would be censored.
What is especially ironic to me is that "bad" words only hold negative power when people make a big deal about them. If you gasp every time someone says one, or do everything you can to prevent their use as some demonic talisman, they maintain their shock value. When I was young and learned my first curse word, I got a secret glee from saying it and seeing my parents reaction; then they decided to not overreact to it and told me instead the word was not polite and its use would make me look ignorant and I stopped using it.
As a wise man once said, "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
On a slightly related final note, for a safe from censorship example of how Chinese intonation can make the same phoneme have different meaning, look at the poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den
I have a chinese friend that I call horse. I wonder if that's why he gets mad every time I call him that.
I didn't know qi was steam though ( I only know a VERY little Chinese ) I guess that's how some people still call a refrigerator an Icebox even though there' no cube of ice at the top that must be replaced these days. Although Icebox is waning.
...
So what's up with Youtube censoring that ..censorship subverted with a popular pun... video all the time?
China has it's firewall, we have big corporations doing the censorship... i'm not sure what's better.
The Song of the Grass-Mud Horse
There is a herd of Grass-Mud Horses whose name
sounds like "Fuck Your Mother".
They live in the wild and beautiful Ma Le Desert,
also known as your mother's cunt.
The Grass-Mud horses are lively and intelligent.
They are fun-loving and nimble.
They live freely in the Ma Le Desert (your mother's cunt).
They are courageous, tenacious, and overcome the difficult environment.
Oh lying down, a Grass-Mud Horse is not afraid to say "Fuck your Mother".
Oh running wild, Grass-Mud Horse is not afraid to say "Your Mother's Cunt".
They defeated the River Crabs called "censorship" and "harmony"
in order to protect their grassland (your mother's vagina).
River Crabs and censorship disappeared from the Ma Le Desert forever!
Support the FairTax
they are happy people though
Where the ass is seen and it ain't so pretty.
pretty much all the same you point out above is illegal in china. and then you get additional limitations: the worst being, no political free speech. this grass-mud horse revolt started because china was instituting a major crackdown on pornography. and then used that crackdown as a cover to shut down a number of pro-democracy sites, like charter 08
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_08
can you see that happening in the west? i'm talking prison JUST FOR SAYING YOU WANT POLITICAL CHANGE. people like you really bother me because you have no perception of scale, and you see a little censorship in the west, and therefore you find that a draconian harsh censorship practice elsewhere is the same thing. utter pure 100% bullshit. your point of view is logically incoherent, ignorant, and plain wrong. no, china and the usa aren't even in the same league. your comparison is utter busllshit
for example: you can't criticize the leaders in china. that will get you tracked and possibly arrested. but here in the west, i can call barack obama anything i want, and no one is going to arrest me. go ahead and try to say the kind of things you can freely say about barack obama in the west, and compare that with what you can get away with criticizing the leadership of china, or iran
that ACTUALLY MAKES A DIFFERENCE AND MEANS A LOT. the censorship in the west is nothing like that in china or iran, and that it is perfectly appropriate, acceptable, and logically coherent to criticize the draconian censorship in china or iran while at the same time celebrating the free speech in the west
the absurdity is that you wish to propose that SOME censorship, regardless of quantity, is the issue, rather than the RELATIVE amounts of censorship
look: in every society that ever existed, for all time, going in the past, and going to all of the future of mankind, there will be SOME rules about not being able to say something. so that means we can't criticize and compare the RELAITVE freedoms of one society to the next?
you really believe that?
your entire point of view on the issue is complete bullshit. you compare societies on the SCALE of their censorship, and then you arrive at a coherent and 100% factually true observation: that you have a lot more freedom of expression on the west. and that MEANS something. ESPECIALLY in regard to politics
you will NEVER have ABSOLUTE freedom of expression in ANY society, forever. and because there might be a few limits here and there in one society you honestly want to say that that society with few limitations on free speech is equivalent to one with draconian and severe limits on expression?
really? you think that's a valid and coherent belief on your part?
you're reasoning abilities have been found to have fallen short
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
> "hint: it begins with "mother-""
I doesn't begin with "mother"; it ends in "mother".
The transliteration is: "Cao Ni Ma". (Ma being horse, mother, hemp, ...)
i can understand it being blocked in china, but why can't we see it in the west?
disturbing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Is that even a story? æ"ä½å½..
"In spoken Chinese, 'grass-mud horse' sounds virtually identical to an obscenity (hint: it begins with "mother-")
Then I guess we should call them "Futher Muckers".
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
...was a hit in France is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique
+
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/niquer
Oh boy and they taught this song to all the kids in the US during the 60s. Woof!
Of course we would never do anything like that in the US like maybe a pop song titled "If You Seek Amy".
it looks kinda like 4 legged version of a Shmoo. But likely far less delicious.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The "grass root horse" is in fact yet another example of the "shanjai" cultural phenomenon in China. Shanjai literally translates to "mountain fort" which in old days were where bandits or rebels retreat in deep mountains out of reach of law or even military. In turbulent times these forts could reach tens of thousands in size and often became seeds of revolutions.
That said, today's "shanjai" takes on a tongue-in-cheek meaning. Originally used to describe brandname knockoffs - i.e. "Your LV bag looks like a shanjai product." - the word started out with a narrow sense of "imitation by wanna-be's not as good as the originals." But as the Net usage in China expands along with an unprecedented opportunity for individual expressions (within the realm of the censors), "shanjai" takes on the broader and positive meanings: DIY, Guerrilla, Garage, if-you-can-I-can-too, small-taking-on-big. There were shanjai Chinese New Year TV Specials (non-mainstream talents netstreamed live against Central TV's broadcast), shajai panda (painted dog), shanjai NASA (really).
Part of shanjai culture, because it's so tongue-in-cheek, is to protest the establishment without getting into trouble. And unlike the Tienanmen time, this time there seems no urgency for a bloody revolution. So while China lags the West in freedom and quality of life in absolute terms, its dF/dt, dL/dt > 0 and that's what matters to many, at least for now. Nonetheless the shanjai culture is growing and sewing the seeds of revolution for the next generation of Chinese. Grass Mud Horse is an animal Gandhi would be proud.
This is rather old news. The Chinese have had slang used to bypass filters for a VERY long time now. (Note that the link is just for general slang, but there are several terms like "grass-mud horse" and "river crab" society in there.)
Yes, it's clever. But this isn't exactly new...
1. your statements are incredibly patronizing and condescending. not to westerns, to everyone you mention. as if i cross a border of a country and POOF, human nature warps into an inscrutable concept i have no right to observe, understand, or criticize. i'm not talking from a western pov, i'm talking from ANY pov. if you actually believe what you said, then no one, in any other culture, can criticize or value anything else from another culture. that national borders are some sort of magic curtain across which everything is inscrutable. fucking bullshit
1. there is no such thing as a western pov, or indian morality, or chinese values. the only logically and morally coherent position on any topic in the world is a human point of view. HUMAN
oh, and please note, if you respond that i am displaying some sort of western arrogance or bias: i said HUMAN. i repeat: HUMAN POINT OF VIEW. therefore, continued attacks on me as a WESTERNER immediately fail. i said HUMAN
if you can't meet me on those terms, HUMAN terms, then you are intellectually dishonest
i do not require provinciality or nationalism to make my arguments. why do you?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
but i must introduce myself:
i am violently antagonistic to any sort of exclusivity or parochialism. that includes by nationality or religion
the only valid moral or intellectual point of view, on any topic is, a human one. period. beginning and end of discussion
as soon as that thought is broken, that's when all the grief in the world begins to be created
i'm just waiting for every else to catch up with that thought
and what's most annoying is when i say i am being to be faithful to a HUMAN morality, not a western one, people respond "yeah but you westerners..."
NO! motherfucker. i said HUMAN. debate on those terms, but don't argue against me by assuming a point of view i am NOT coming from. that's YOU introducing retarded bias, not me
its so fucking ingrained, people can't even begin to conceptualize the fact that just maybe, i might actually be arguing with 100% fidelity to the idea of a notion that is human, NOT WESTERN
a moral conviction that does not require the west, that is equally understandable, realizable, and ability to be independently appreciated in tehran, rio de janiero, yokohama, or hamburg
really
such that to argue against what i am saying by saying anything western this or anything chinese that or anything indian there
instant fail
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
a wildly popular YouTube video with children's voices singing words that are either completely benign or incredibly offensive, depending on how you listen.
Maybe the "grass-mud horse" is related to Puff The Magic Dragon.
Why yes, I AM overrated. Sorry I forgot to opt out of that Karma Bonus. -1 Whoosh.